Sell, the Great Traveller. He wrote with the feverish energy of a
man who sees the shadow of actual starvation cast across his
manuscript. When the tale was finished there remained the work of
revision, and after that, worst of all, fears lest the bookseller
were already suited.

Fortune, however, was kind to him, and he was successful in
extracting for his story the sum of twenty pounds. Borrow had not
mixed among gypsies for nothing. He, a starving and unknown author,
succeeded in extracting from a bookseller twenty pounds for a story,
twice the amount offered by Sir Richard Phillips for a novel on the
lines of The Dairyman's Daughter. It was an achievement.

The first argument against the story, as related by Borrow, is that
he was not without resources at the time. Why should he be so
impoverished a few weeks after receiving payment for Celebrated
Trials? {57a} Above all, why did he not realise upon Simpkin &
Marshall's bill for Faustus? He would have experienced no difficulty
in discounting a bill accepted by such a firm. It seems hardly
conceivable that he should preserve this piece of paper when he had
only eighteen-pence in the world. Everything seems to point to the
fact that in May 1825 Borrow was not in want of money, and if he were
not, why did he almost kill himself by writing the Life and
Adventures of Joseph Sell? Again, at that period he had met with no
adventures such as might be included in the life of a "Great
Traveller," and Borrow was not an inventive writer. Later he
possessed plenty of material; for there can be no question that he
roamed about the world for a considerable portion of those seven
mysterious years of his life that came to be known as the "Veiled
Period." His accuracy as to actual occurrences has been so